Then I remembered that cool Wordle site. So I took my list of names and made a Wordle!

In this story, there’s also a mountainous area called the Tiger Range. There are no tigers on this planet and never have been. The reason for the name had to do with a secondary character and his very rich father and how the father’s personal symbol was a tiger… and well, that secondary character isn’t even in the story any more, but the mountains were still called the Tiger Range. And I had been wondering if I should change the name… However, the planet does have plenty of Banded Iron Formations (layers of iron oxides and shale, chert, tiger eye or jasper), and today I discovered that there’s another name for them: Tiger Iron. On Earth, tiger iron is found in Western Australia. *wants some tiger iron jewelry now*

Algae, my story about love, art, and iron mining on the frigidly cold planet Diamanta, was recently accepted to the Distant Worlds anthology of novella-length science fiction (to be published by The Library of Science Fiction and Fantasy Press). This will be my second published story, and my first story to appear in print format (there will be an ebook version as well). Needless to say, I couldn’t be more stoked! The Distant Worlds anthology also contains novellas by Patty Jansen, A.L. Sirois, Michael C. Pennington, and Aleksandar Žiljak.

What I’m working on

Right now I’m writing the first draft of a novel, Sweet Heart Catalyst. My main character is one of a series of twenty-six identical clones who were genetically engineered to have telepathic and empathic abilities as well as unusual physical strength and resilience. So theoretically, he should be awesome at everything, right? Well… maybe not so much. He’s also young, and insecure, and so desperate to prove himself in his chosen field of law enforcement, that he ends up making a major mistake: he violates the rights of a suspect in custody. In doing so, he not only breaks the law, but his own personal code of ethics, and the biological software inside his head. Suddenly everything becomes a colossal mess, and he has to fix it–or else governments will fall, peace treaties will fail, bullets will fly, and a kidnapped little girl will die. How does he put everything right? I’m working on that

In case anybody’s wondering what happened to my other novel project, The Outerlands, it’s on the back burner right now.

Rebirth of this blog

This blog has been quiet for a while, mainly because I found the effort of posting here too daunting. See, I got too caught up in feeling like any public posts I made had to be “worthy” of some standard. I was always reading things about how writers need to blog in order to generate more interest in their work, and draw more potential readers to their site, and “build their brand”, and so forth. Which are all great things. But I found that whenever I sat down, with those goals in mind, to write some sort of well thought-out, articulate, intelligent, writing-related article, it would (1) take me forever, and (2) leave me feeling tapped out, like I’d shot my wad writing about writing… instead of, you know, WRITING!

There are people out there who are doing amazing things with their blogs: discussing the exciting and challenging aspects of the writing craft, creating communities of mutual interest while getting their own names out there, and all the while managing to write and create and submit and publish. However (*giant light bulb*), I am not one of those people. Therefore I’ve decided that from now on, my main focus will be on the types of posts that come more naturally to me: progress on my WIPs, character art, neato things I found while doing research for stories, plus occasional tweets of a sentence from a WIP. Things that are probably not terribly exciting to anyone else, but that help energize and sustain my creative process. If this somehow peripherally results in one or two more people becoming interested in what I’m doing, why then, that’d be swell too. But for me to worry too much about “building my brand” seems a bit premature. Maybe when I finish story #3

Well, but I like the details, though. Like, I had been trying to figure out how much my characters’ field service truck should weigh (so that I can make it fall through the ice). I was sifting through all these web sites, and they would give weights like 6,000 lbs and it just didn’t make sense, until I realized that was merely the weight of the service body that’s attached on top of the truck. So then finally today I found the most wonderful page on mechanics’ trucks, where the author went into great detail about how much they weigh when loaded, and *why*. You get a truck, you put a crane on top, then add all the 9 zillion tools and gear you need to fix heavy equipment like mining machines, and that makes it *way heavier than I had thought*. Because if you try to lift something really heavy, like for example an engine that weighs a couple thousand pounds, with a crane attached to a little light truck, well, the truck tips over. I never thought of it before. But it makes sense, right?

Then I started working on the very first scene and I realized that I’ve given them 3 hours of sunlight that day, ’cause it’s late fall/early winter—but *what time* does the sun come up? Surely it’s not up yet when my main character walks out his front door early that morning. And what time does it set? I decided to use a town near the Arctic Circle in NWT as a model, and found out that on a certain day in late November, the sun would come up noonish and set around 3pm. And this just caused me to squee. Because the timing just worked right for a dramatic moment in the story when my characters need to see the last light of sunset.

For my third lightbulb moment—I had been imagining my mysterious algal bloom coming up from below the ice and melting through to the surface. And it had been bugging me, because I needed this melting to happen rather quickly and create a huge hole in the ice and render my ice road temporarily unusable—and surely this algae doesn’t get so hot that it could melt through a large area of a couple feet’s thickness of ice in a matter of hours when it’s thirty degrees below zero outside? Then I remembered a part on the Ice Road Truckers show where they talk about pressure ridges of ice over a lake being thrust up by rapid changes in temperature, and I realized that I don’t necessarily need to melt through all the ice, I just need it to break. And if I have the heat causing a rapid temperature change, then my ice can actually rupture in a violent event that wouldn’t take much time at all. Yay!

Well, now that I’ve gotten some of these details hashed out, I’ve moved on to the whipping-into-shape phase. My strategy is to (1) make a brief outline of what happens in the story, as it is now, (2) read through the draft and mark it up, (3) make another brief outline of the story as I would like it to be, and then (4) edit the story according to the outline. This workflow seems to work well for me. Anyone else do this, or have their own method to share?

In my story, there are algae that live in the very cold lakes of the planet Diamanta, and bloom only once every one hundred years. When they bloom, they exert a great deal of energy, resulting in enough heat to melt ice. My version is a good deal more fanciful than the Blood Falls bacteria, but there are some similarities–they have a slow metabolism, they live under the ice for long periods of time and then they finally burst forth in a way that can’t be ignored. I use these organisms as a metaphor for love. (Oh, go ahead and laugh if you want!)

Ice fish don’t have any significant part to play in my story–I just thought they were cool!

In this story, my main character is a diesel mechanic (and an aspiring artist) who after being dumped by his ex-wife and having a falling-out with his best friend/coworker, has decided to pick up and move to the space station where his ex-wife now lives. He has set aside a vacation day to finish one last art project—a metal sculpture—but he’s unexpectedly called back to work for a repair job at one of the mines. As he and his former buddy drive to the mine, in the dead of winter, across the surface of a frozen lake, they come to a spot where the ice has begun to inexplicably and rapidly melt.

I ended up having to do a lot of research for this story. In fact, I’ve never had to do this much research for a story before! I thought it would be fun to show some of the things I’ve been reading and learning about.